They sadly no longer have the ears to hear him. He becomes a revolutionary, a tragic figure that urgently calls out to his fellow townspeople to resist the insanity. I suppose it goes to show that these days you never know what might run up your street.

It was the first English-language production of the play, starred future husband-and-wife team Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright, and was directed by Orson Welles. The French playwright Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994) inaugurated. Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco in a new version by Zinnie Harris. Rhinoceros was a 1960 production of Eugne Ionesco 's surrealist play of the same name, which had been written the year before. Literally written as a universal parable. But by the end of the play Berenger, in his success at resisting ‘rhinoceritus’, is the character that has changed the most. human existence in his play Rhinoceros (1959). It is Berenger with whom we identify the most as he drifts through life without purpose, comically passive, bored and self-obsessed. In a grocery and a caf, the mundane squabbles of bourgeois life fill the air. All of them that is except for the ‘Everyman’ character of Berenger. Eugne Ionesco and Rhinoceros Background Summary Act One (part one) Summary Rhinoceros opens in a provincial town square after church on Sunday. This play is on one level very simple: The inhabitants of a French town in the 1950’s one by one turn into a rhinoceros until they all become a mindless and savage herd. He had witnessed this strange malady in people regardless of their social class or political beliefs. But more importantly, Ionesco wrote it as an attack on something that troubled him greatly: social conformity. Ionesco’s most renowned play Rhinoceros, was written in 1959 in response to the resurfacing of fascism in parts of Europe.

Venue: Theatre of the Arts, Modern Languages Building

Rhinoceros eugène ionesco